Twisting branches

click for some more variations

Fractal trees do seem very 80s, but I recently saw this nice interactive experiment (which was inspired by this), and couldn’t resist trying it out in a quick Grasshopper sketch.

It was easily generalised to 3D by using reference frames.
Just varying the positions of the endpoints of the first pair of branches produces a great range of forms.
When branches are of equal length to the trunk, with a separation angle of 2PI/3 and a twist of ArcCos(1/3) (the dihedral angle of a tetrahedron), the resulting tree is the skeleton of the Gyroid – the Wells(10,3)-a Net.

I think this would be a really fun thing  to link to some AR style 3d-tracking, so you could move a couple of fiducial markers around in space and have the model update in realtime.

 

combining Voronoi with Field Lines

 

Is there anything new to say about Voronoi diagrams?

We all know Voronoi diagrams right? At the AA there was a bit of a running joke about how much they were used. A quick image search will turn up thousands of design projects based on them. Their wide appeal is understandable – they have a simple and clear logic which can be used to generate organic looking tessellations from any pattern of input points.

The recent obsession with them in architecture schools goes back maybe 6 or 7 years, but they were invented more than 100 years ago. So are there still aspects of them which have not yet been explored?

 

London Knowledge Lab talk

I am pleased to announce I will be talking at the London Knowledge Lab on December the 9th as part of their Maths-Art seminar series.

Loxodrome surface

The title of the talk is Intuitive Geometry

Read the abstract here

Updates to follow later today

I also have tons of new stuff to post on here – Animation, Rendering, Scripting, Math, GC, Grasshopper…

watch this space

(Or in the meantime, watch this)

or this:

(or see the flash vector version here)
more variations here, here and here

For some interactivity, have a play with my flash toy ‘MotionSketcher’

MotionSketcher1

MotionSketcher2

MotionSketcher3

Based on the very simple idea of a loop which resets when the mouse goes over it, it allows you to intuitively scribble your own animation. Try combing the whole field in one direction, or making a spinning whirlwind…